Thursday, November 14, 2013

john st. Creatives want the world to know Toronto is #MORETHANFORD

The Rob Ford saga has continues to provide the world with its recommended daily allowance of Schadenfreude as the elected Mayor of Toronto vows to keep his position despite admissions that he bought and smoked crack in office, having had numerous lies to Council exposed, misuse of City funds, and accusations of being a dangerous boozer and a general nasty guy.

Poor Toronto. In terms of municipal PR, Mayor Ford is worse than SARS. But somehow I doubt the Rolling Stones, AC/DC and Rush will come to the aid of the shamed megacity.

Its advertising community, however, has. Two art directors at john st., Hannah Smit and Marie Richer, have slapped together an online campaign, #MORETHANFORD, to show all the things about Toronto that don't revolve around the Mayor in a drunken stupor:

The women spent two days asking everyone around them what they love about the city, and then scoured video sharing sites YouTube and Vimeo looking for footage that represented those examples. They then edited together a compilation, set to the song Live in this City by Toronto musicians Dragonette. (Every video sampled is credited and linked to in the description, and Ms. Smit says they have not had complaints from anyone asking not to be part of it.)

The website asks people to tweet things they love about Toronto, or to even allow the campaign access to their Twitter accounts to send out messages more widely. It also tracks which hashtag is winning, in terms of the amount of conversation on Twitter: #RobFord or #MoreThanFord. It’s an imperfect measure of course, since many of the people talking about Ford are not on Twitter, or even on Twitter are using different hashtags such as #TOpoli or no hashtags at all. But it’s not meant to be scientific: the message of the campaign is about starting a new conversation, Ms. Smit said.

Not an exciting video, being a montage and all, but I feel their pain. I live in Ottawa. Being branded by bad politics is nothing new to me.